Believe me, you have been waiting for a film like this to be on the PÖFF Competition Programme for a long time. And even more so from Russia. And what a title. A slasher akin to an electric shock, the straightforward and boldfaced B-film aesthetics of which could well make the big name of this genre, Quention Tarantno himself, green with envy. This is a ‘hammer straight on the head between the eyes’ brutal bloodbath in which 29-year-old director Kirill Sokolov does not hold back in anything. And quite rightly so, why should he? The film takes place practically within one dwelling and starts as any other ‘normal’ film. At the request of his girlfriend, a young man turns up at the doorstep of her father one night. The girl asks him to kill her father, but her motives remain unclear. What happens next in this satirical comedy, you will have to find out at the cinema. The film unrolls into a spectacle characteristic of a proper splatter, something similar to the midnight hit of the previous PÖFF, “Revenge”, where the viewers are proverbially doused in buckets of blood and gore to which there seems to be no end. And it’s not disgusting – it’s bloody funny! However, jokes aside, “Why Don’t You Just Die” is actually a lot more than antics and escapades. Parallels can for instance be drawn to Zvyagintsev’s “Loveless”, albeit in a different key. The Best Film Award from the Vyborg Film Festival may well have caused mumbles of envy at the award ceremony, but Sokolov – considered to be the successor of Aleksey Balabanov (Brother) – was the right man in the right place. In the light of Sokolov’s great ambitions, he will not be coming to PÖFF for anything less than the main award of the Debut Competition Programme. Who could argue against it? Helmut Jänes
